Modelling social identification and helping in evacuation simulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel pedestrian evacuation model incorporating social identity factors, aiming to improve simulation realism by aligning with crowd psychology insights, and analyzes its behavior through uncertainty quantification in a specific evacuation scenario.

Contribution

It formulates a social identity-based pedestrian simulation algorithm and demonstrates its potential to better replicate psychological crowd behaviors in evacuation modeling.

Findings

Model captures social identity effects on evacuation behavior

Uncertainty analysis reveals parameter sensitivities

Scenario validation with real-world data

Abstract

Social scientists have criticised computer models of pedestrian streams for their treatment of psychological crowds as mere aggregations of individuals. Indeed most models for evacuation dynamics use analogies from physics where pedestrians are considered as particles. Although this ensures that the results of the simulation match important physical phenomena, such as the deceleration of the crowd with increasing density, social phenomena such as group processes are ignored. In particular, people in a crowd have social identities and share those social identities with the others in the crowd. The process of self categorisation determines norms within the crowd and influences how people will behave in evacuation situations. We formulate the application of social identity in pedestrian simulation algorithmically. The goal is to examine whether it is possible to carry over the psychological model to computer models of pedestrian motion so that simulation results correspond to observations from crowd psychology. That is, we quantify and formalise empirical research on and verbal descriptions of the effect of group identity on behaviour. We use uncertainty quantification to analyse the model's behaviour when we vary crucial model parameters. In this first approach we restrict ourselves to a specific scenario that was thoroughly investigated by crowd psychologists and where some quantitative data is available: the bombing and subsequent evacuation of a London underground tube carriage on July 7th 2005.